Thom Tillis narrowly trails Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan in the North Carolina Senate race, according to an internal poll conducted for the Republican challenger’s own campaign, but the incumbent is struggling to attract support among voters who indicated they were most likely to cast a ballot in November.

[…] The poll—which, like all internal surveys leaked to the media, should be viewed warily—was taken Oct. 4-7 and interviewed 600 likely voters. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Hagan has unexpectedly emerged as the strongest Democratic incumbent in a Senate battleground this year, holding a narrow but consistent lead over Tillis in a state that backed Mitt Romney in 2012. It has been months since any public poll showed Tillis ahead. But Tillis’s campaign, in a memo, argued that her small edge depends on turning out voters among the least likely to vote on Election Day. The poll found that the Republican actually leads Hagan 47 percent to 43 percent among voters who rated their interest in the election, on a scale of 1 to 10, at 8 or higher. That bloc that constitutes 75 percent of the total electorate polled.

Hagan also benefits from the small but significant support for Haugh, the Libertarian candidate. But it’s unclear how much of his current share he’ll maintain until November.Traditionally, third-party candidates lose support as Election Day approaches, and POS found that his support has already shrunk since May, when he drew 9 percent.

The Tillis campaign argues that Hagan’s inability to reach more than 45 percent support is proof that Tillis can capture victory with a late surge in momentum, aided by a pool of undecided voters who disapprove of President Obama by a margin of 57 percent to 37 percent.

“Thom Tillis has a clear path to victory despite being outspent in negative attacks by outside money,” the POS pollster who conducted the survey, Glen Bolger, wrote in the memo. “Tillis has a momentum advantage. He has a turnout advantage. Democrats will intensify their attacks in an effort to deny the GOP a Senate majority. This election is going down to the wire.”

I think it’ll be interesting to see if the Rhodes write-in campaign gets more an 0.25% of the vote. Normally write-ins get less than that. If Haugh gets over 3.5%, I would also say that’s indicative of how deeply people dislike the major party choices this year.

As the traditional center-right parties move left, many of their voters reject that move. We see it in the US in voters casting protest voters or staying home or sitting out a particular race. In Europe, it has led to the rise of new parties, such as Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) organized last year in response to Merkel moving the CDU left, and already taking away CDU seats in both the EU parliament and every German state election held since it was organized.

Even more spectacularly, in the UK, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), whose signature issue is getting out of the EU but which also pushes big cuts to immigration, legal and illegal, a libertarian economic policy, and opposition to gay marriage, has exploded onto the political landscape as David Cameron has pushed his ”modernization” (or pushing the party to the left) of the Conservative Party. For two years sets of local elections around the UK, UKIP has run very strong, picking off lots of Conservative Party seats. Then in this year’s elections for the EU Parliament, UKIP became the first party other than Labour or Conservatives to come in first in a nationwide election. That same election saw the Conservative Party come in at third place for the first time in its long history.

Now, a new political earthquake hit the UK yesterday in a pair of by-elections (special elections) for the national UK parliament. In the previous Conservative safe seat of Clacton, UKIP won with almost 60% of the vote, 35 points ahead of the Conservative candidate, making it now a UKIP safe seat. In a former Labour Party safe seat in the north, UKIP came within 2 percentage points (600 votes) of winning the seat, making it now a Labour marginal seat.